Christianity is neither Left nor Right, but radical and daunting

I’ve always found Easter difficult. This is the moment when you have to confront the sublime awfulness of the Christian message: that someone else was prepared to die for you. Jesus underwent beating, scourging, humiliation and crucifixion all to set you free. Is this lumpy, lazy, lascivious historian worth it? I have my doubts.

When I was an atheist, the crucifixion caused me great offence. I loathed the idea that someone should suffer on my behalf without my consent. How could one historical event determine the moral value of everyone who lived thereafter? How could the Fall damn all men for all time, and how could Good Friday save them? The crucifixion seemed like such a passive, unnecessary act, too. What kind of God would allow his son to die in great agony for a people who had betrayed him? And why didn’t Jesus actually fight the unjust authorities that governed Judea rather than submit to them? The crucifixion encapsulated the subtle evil of Christianity – the idea that suffering is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do about it, except fill the collection box and pray that it all ends after death.

When I was younger, I was a socialist and I was convinced that morality was found and expressed in collective action. Injustice shouldn’t be suffered, it should be smashed. We had to identify problems and come up with a policy for dealing with them – poverty, male chauvinism, racism, pollution etc. In retrospect, it was a lot of wasted energy. Life was a string of committee meetings – a committee for the formation of a committee – while we agitated for a social revolution that never came. Always I was motored by the conviction that I had to be better than the Christians who went to their useless deaths with patronising grace. I wanted action and I wanted results, and I was certain that I had the momentum of history behind me. Nobody would have convinced me that all that energy would be for nought; that I’d grow up to live under a Tory government implementing a programme of brutal cuts largely supported by the voting public. Far from history moving forwards, we seem to be living in the 1980s.

After ten years of personal and political failure, I now think martyrdom is infinitely preferable to revolution. In its original Greek, “martyr” means witness. Far from a passive act of surrender, it is a defiant act that stands as a testament to faith – a challenge, a call to arms, a profession of love. When St Peter was crucified (upside down because he refused to imitate Christ) he died bearing witness to the man he believed was God. When 225 priests were slaughtered during the 1792 September Massacres, because they refused to accept the religious authority of the French Revolutionary republic, they did not die vainly but did so as witnesses to the injustice of the mob. Death understood as an act of resistance, defiance or statement of belief is a concept that resonates in Buddhist, Shinto, Jewish and Islamic traditions. Far from submissive, it’s about the boldest thing a man could ever do.

Christianity asks that every revolution should start with you. As a socialist, I tended to externalize my politics and tried to use collective action to compel others to live by my principles. As a Christian, my principles are now internalized. I ask not what society should do, but what I can do to help the people around me. That principle might sound quite simple and universal, but actually it is burdensome in the extreme. The weight of responsibility for change shifts from nation to individual. Don’t gripe about Tory cuts: give money to the poor. Don’t blather about the fate of the polar bear: recycle. Don’t complain about the immorality of others: get your own bedroom in order. The reasons why Jesus' death is the greatest act in history is because it was the purest act of selflessness. That's why people have been prepared, in turn, to die for it. People like Saint Lawrence, who was roasted on a spit when he tried to bring the Good News to the Romans. “Turn me over,” he said to his executioners. “I’m done on this side.”

Why, if I am reconciled to the justice of martyrdom, am I still ashamed to look at the cross? Because I worry that I’m not personally worthy of Jesus’ sacrifice. I’m nearly thirty now and I know I’ve done very little for anybody else. Instead of being a willing witness, I’ve stayed at home, packed on the pounds, smoked, drunk, blasphemed, fooled around, gossiped, lied, dishonoured my mother and father, watched far more Battlestar Galactica than is healthy for a grown man, and, so help me, I even own a couple of books by Jeremy Clarkson. I find it hard to accept that God could love this bundle of sins and prejudices.

But I understand that if I am to deserve redemption, the change has got to start with me. I can’t expect to find Heaven within society, and I can’t demand anything from others that I would not do myself. That’s the politically radical message of Christianity – it’s up to me to get my stuff together.